


Disquiet

by Alison_Ocean



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Kylo Ren Has Issues, Kylo Ren Needs a Hug, POV Kylo Ren
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 10:14:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13809078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alison_Ocean/pseuds/Alison_Ocean
Summary: Rey. He resents the longing his mind wraps around that small, inconsequential word. Scant weeks haven’t erased the sharpness of her, precise and constant as a needle under skin.(Brief character study of Kylo Ren/Ben Solo after the events of The Last Jedi.)





	Disquiet

He’s often unsure which he despises more – the days or the nights. Ignoring the fact that they seem to blend together when you’ve been inhabiting a black sky for as long as he has, both carry their own distinct flavors of torment. The day used to signify discomfort; tension. Not painful, but not pleasant, either. Supreme Leader Snoke’s expectations clashing against his own for himself, the uncertainty of his leadership, never failed to leave some small part of him writhing in unease. He felt like an imposter more often than the successor of a legacy – something that he would die before confiding to anyone, even his former master. Snoke never let him forget what else he was, at any rate. He was many things. A Skywalker. An apprentice. A coward. Pathetic. Sentimental. Unbalanced. Unprepared. _Child_.

The responsibility of an empire never stopped carving into his shoulders; its jagged edges pricking at the bruises that sometimes blossomed on his skin. These would be exclusively from Snoke; he’d be damned if he was going to let anyone raise a hand to him _but_ his former master.

He can still remember the first time Snoke shoved lightning into his veins. It was a sensation that never dulled with time. When it first happened, he’d fallen backwards; an automatic response to such an onslaught of sensation. His skull had cracked against an onyx floor; his vision had been black for minutes. When a pinhole of light had finally pierced the darkness, expanding and expanding on itself like a supernova until he could see his surroundings again, his master had gone. He had been alone. Left to meditate on his failures, he’d suspected. Or to bleed out in the corridor like a dog.

It had taken 14 precise sutures to pull the edges of his scalp back together. When he runs his hand through his hair, he can feel the raised ridge of the scar. And that had only been the first time. There had been many times afterwards. There was always a lesson to be learned; always a failure of his in need of correction. And no failure was ever forgotten when pain was added to the equation. He knew that from sharp experience.

Now that Snoke is gone, he wallows in promises to himself. _Never again_ , he repeats in quiet moments. He would never let anyone cross so many thresholds of pain again without fighting back. _Never again._ Like a mantra.

He almost believes himself. But in the back of his mind there is always the cringing doubt; he had let it happen once before. In a moment of profound weakness, he could just as easily make the mistake again. The mistake of trusting what he thinks he understands. Of surrendering himself fully to things that have the power to destroy him; to hold his free will hostage, and slowly rip it to shreds.

_Never again._

He hadn’t needed Han Solo to tell him – he had sensed for some time that Snoke was using him for two things: his bloodline and his talent with the Force. It had become more apparent, the longer of a leash that he was allowed in the Order. He was utilized to seek out and engage the enemy, but no decisions were his to make – save the execution of Solo, and the planned annihilation of Skywalker. Despite sharing Snoke’s resolve in both of these pursuits, he had come to realize, inch by inch, the extent of Snoke’s control over him. Even worse – how he had handed himself over to that control, offering no resistance from the beginning.

He’d acted like a child. He’d given in to fear. Alone, rejected, and mortally threatened by the one man who’d promised to help him. To _fix_ him. To make him whole and teach him the control over his instincts that he’d craved since he first felt that terrible ripple of power from a dark, seething place inside.

 _Luke Skywalker._ The name makes his hands shake; his neck go taught. _Traitor._ The so-called Jedi master’s actions had snapped the only thread still holding him to the Resistance; to the life he’d known as Ben Solo.

He’d known in a second that he could never go back home – not after what he’d done. Or _believed_ he’d done. The truth mocks him now – that Luke Skywalker hadn’t met death at his hand that night, after all. If he had known that, maybe he would have chosen differently. If he had used his head – reached out with his ever-feared _power_ for just a moment – maybe he would have sensed that his uncle was still alive. Instead of unraveling completely, forgetting to think through his shock. He’d been sloppy; paranoid.

It had terrified him, how easily he had cut down every student who rushed him with violence in their eyes that night. The memory of his cowardice makes him burn with shame even now. Snoke had worked tirelessly to burn such sentiments out of him, and yet they _persisted_.

But he hadn’t been the one to orchestrate his departure from everything he knew; from home. Skywalker’s bloodlust, the decisiveness of his final act, was what had finally driven him across the only threshold that would have him – that of the First Order. Of Snoke’s apprenticeship. Join or die – in a single night, everything that his life had been or could have been was stripped away. His existence was boiled infinitely down, until all that was left was that choice. Join or die. It hadn’t been a choice for him.

He is Supreme Leader now. For the first time that he can remember, he has complete autonomy in his own destiny. Legions await his command, he will never again have to bow before those who smile through their teeth and plot to destroy him. He has control. He has reached heights of power that Vader never did. By one instantaneous decision, he changed the future of the galaxy.

The victory is ash in his mouth. It was all for nothing. Everything has shifted, yet he hasn’t moved an inch from where he was.  

He’d thought he’d found a way out of the conflict that drags at him like chains – every day, no rest, no respite. He’d thought he’d stumbled upon a reason to hope. Now, the hopelessness swells with the disquiet, festering like a rotten wound. Something isn’t right. The belonging he seeks is still sprinting ahead of him, just out of reach.  His last chance of belonging evaporated like mist before it could even be realized, and, after all this time, he is still nothing more than an imposter. He was an imposter of the Jedi order, then an imposter of Darth Vader’s legacy. Now he is an imposter of Supreme Leader.

He’d thought, he’s been _sure_ , that killing Luke would end this torment. That it would grant him a final reprieve from the terror and regret that sit like stones in his heart. But now Luke is dead – and not by his hand. His ultimate goal for countless moons, and he failed to achieve it. The opportunity is never coming back. The past remains to haunt him forever.

He feels the self-hatred rise, barely contained, just as he feels the conflict inside himself. Luke’s death, devoid of meaning, did not ease it. In fact, their final confrontation seems to have only made it stronger. It tears at him like a starving wolf.

Something about the nature of Luke’s death feeds the feeling. The images tug at his memory, elusive but insistent. Something about those eyes, remind him of another pair. Just as steeled, but edged with contrition and compassion beyond words.

For weeks after the upheaval on Crait, he hadn’t been able to sleep. As one of his first directives as Supreme Leader, he’d sent multiple fleets to scout for a planet that met the conditions for a new Starkiller base. To find one could take years, he knew. But nothing had seemed more important to him, following the First Order’s last skirmish with the Resistance. Amidst the numbness of disbelief (he’d been blindsided in more ways than one, that day) and the claws of furious anger scraping at his ribs, one need had risen above the rest. Like a thirst burning in his throat, he needed to reduce that salt-encrusted wasteland to a vapor cloud of ash and blood-red dust.

Ever since that day, it seemed like the insides of his eyelids had been seared with glistening reds and blinding whites. His dreams were awash in blood and soft skin.

But on other nights, he wouldn’t stay asleep long enough to really dream. He’d feel his body drop into unconsciousness, each limb slowly taking on weight. Like sinking into a pool of still water. Black and quiet, if it was a good night.

_“Ben.”_

Just like that, his whole body was a spasm. Thrashing to the surface, sweating, gasping. He couldn’t tell who spoke the words – the voice always sounded familiar, but when he was conscious he could never place it. The girl, or Luke, or his fath-…Han Solo. Maybe some warped cacophony of everyone who’d ever known him. It was never certain who called his name, but he would shove himself back into reality before any more could be said.

He’d thought the drugs would help. Powerful sedatives, self-administered after he’d finished training in the bowels of the imperial cruiser. He would spend hours running fight simulations, usually stopping only when he had hacked the metallic decoys until they were unrecognizable; vaguely animated columns of smoking rubble where human forms had once been constructed. No one questioned him, and he didn’t care. Come the following morning, the machinery would be replaced and pristine by unseen subordinates, and he would begin again.

His limbs wrung out with exhaustion, he would make the journey to his old quarters. He recoils inwardly at the thought of sleeping in Snoke’s vacuous chambers. He knows his leeriness is groundless, but it seems foolish to tempt the dead like that.

Once sequestered in his room, he would shovel down enough food to sate his hunger before swallowing the pills. He’d collapse on the bed, tired to the bone, and hope that it would be enough. That he had done enough to salvage a few brief hours of oblivion.

But the sedatives had had the opposite effect. No longer just tension, the dreams became pure torture. The drugs pinned him down and gagged him, forcing him to stay unconscious while he killed his father over, and over, and over, and over again.

The spluttering red of his saber split his reflection in Han Solo’s eyes. Dark and light. Weak and strong. Kylo and Ben. In the dreams, he could never tell which was which. Both stared out at him from those eyes. The eyes that had never left him, not for a second of it. The eyes that still haunt him. His cheek ached where Han Solo’s coarse hands had touched it, gently saying goodbye before the end. He was trapped in the memory, agonized by it. It would never end. He would never know peace.

He’d thrown the pills out with shaky hands, after tearing his room nearly to shreds. He’d ripped up the furniture that was bolted to the floors, and carved smoldering gashes into the blank metal walls, as if he could somehow scar the ship that was now the only home he had in this universe. But like everything else, there is no escaping it. All of the damage would be replaced come the next evening. It would be like no one had ever touched it. His efforts are not enough. He lives in a void. Silent and cold.

He gives brief directives to the remaining commanders; anemic attempts to locate the new Rebel base. He knows that he is working with no verified information; he sends troops to wrack the First Order’s systems, but the Resistance may as well have disappeared in a cloud of smoke for all the intel they glean. The disquiet grows with every failed reconnaissance.

He knows Hux would relish greater responsibility in the ongoing hunt for the Rebels. But the thought of the general holding any legitimate authority within the new order puts a sick feeling in his stomach. He avoids the problem by delegating conditional assignments to Hux; making the cur feel important while not granting him any real decisive power. The First Order has suffered catastrophic losses in any case; reconstruction, for now, takes obvious precedence over aggressive strategy.

He spends most of his days (if they can even be called that) keeping up appearances. Wandering the ship, monitoring operations, following paths he’s taken hundreds of times. He yearns for solitude like a drug fix, but he rarely feels completely alone. If not the troopers and commanders, sometimes he’ll catch a glimpse of coarse skin and tanned fabric swimming against the reflective chrome.

_Father._

Instinct always recognizes the figure before his conscious mind can catch up to it, lock it down, gag it. Han Solo looks the same as the last time – he always does. It’s as if he never left him. His eyes, especially, are the same. Now, when he meets them, they fill with sympathy that’s more unbearable than the anger he had expected. He knows that look; it’s achingly familiar. It’s the last look he gave him, before he fell.

 _Ben,_ his eyes say. They hold love, compassion, and such devastating understanding.

It makes the blood rush to his head while his legs go hollow, and he has to look away in order to feel his lungs again.

He’s grateful that he doesn’t see Han Solo very often. That these glimpses are rare and brief enough that he can feign indifference, even though the after-shock of the pain takes longer to fade.

He remembers the first time he saw the girl through the force bond. Ironically, his thoughts had immediately gone to his father.

It had been so utterly unexpected, their connection. Like a circuit suddenly lining up. He had read about force connections, but the experience was much more…blunt than he’d imagined. There had been no preamble to it, only a faint, rushing sound in his ears, like the swell of a distant ocean. The air had gone thick. The pressure had felt similar to the gloom before a lightning storm.

Then she’d simply appeared, out of nowhere. The vision had been rock-solid, like she’d been there the whole time and he just hadn’t noticed her. Much like Han Solo. So much so, that he’d frozen when he first saw her – and, for one desperate second, racked his brain to remember whether he’d killed her himself and somehow forgotten. That she was now haunting him, too. However, even ignoring the stinging trace on his cheek that evidenced the results of their last meeting, the sharp recoil of her blaster had effectively dispelled the notion that she was anything but, glaringly, alive.

The acute release he’d felt at that realization was something he couldn’t have predicted. The relief of not having yet another death on his hands had been irrepressible and immediate, surprising even him with its intensity. While he was trying to process that, something else had taken hold. Like a weight leaving his chest, and something more buoyant filling it up. It was the sun coming out from behind a cloud and how, in its brightness, you could almost forget how dim the shadows had been. Without any apparent reason, without knowing to what end…he had begun to hope.

The crest that now marks his shoulder – glinting shards slicing through the First Order’s round insignia; the symbol of an unquestioned leader – reminds him how much has changed since then. Small and inconsequential as it is, he feels of the weight of that scrap of titanium where it presses against his right side. The assurance of his power within the First Order seems the only thing he can be assured of now, given everything else that has transpired. The scattered pieces of what had been the straight, narrow lines he occupied now swirl around him indiscriminately – not dissimilar to the meteor-field of debris that is all that remains of what was, only weeks ago, an entire imperial fleet.

When he’d heard that it was his godmother who’d all but vaporized most of the First Order’s artillery, he couldn’t control the ironic twist of his lips, even with Hux glaring in disgust. Vice Admiral Holdo had always been known within wiser circles as a force to be reckoned with. She and General Organa were cut from the same cloth. He wonders, if he had been placed in charge of offensive tactics, whether he would have perceived her strategy before Hux did. He believes he would have, but that’s probably misplaced pride talking. Snoke was always warning him against the consequences of hollow pride. As he often reminded him, he had not earned the right to pride. Such indulgence, paired with his weak mind, would leave him susceptible to even greater failures than those he’d already realized.

He shakes his head. Even weeks dead, his old master’s influence saturates his thoughts like a stench. It’s difficult to shake free of all those years. He’s not sure whether he even should. After all, what options are in front of him now? Embrace full command of the First Order or exile himself to the furthest reaches of the galaxy. The very thought puts heat in his blood. He will not slink away to be reviled and despised. But any hope he had of breaking from the other path – of breaking away from everything that was fighting to destroy him, or at least resolving the clashing desires that had brought him to this pass (caught between two sides of a war, what a sickening metaphor) – dissolved like salt into water the second the girl closed the Falcon’s hatch.

The girl. The scavenger. _Rey._ He resents the longing his mind wraps around that small, inconsequential word. Scant weeks haven’t erased the sharpness of her, precise and constant as a needle under skin. 

It was foolish of him to stake his hope of release, of agency without cages, of balance and belonging, on a single person.

_Snoke would be disgusted._

He grimaces. There it is again. The failure that he can never seem to escape.

But he’d been so certain of her. So certain of the lie, that she would stand with him. That he could convince her to stay. Had it all been a lie? As the dark hours continue to pass with no sign of her – of what had, for a moment, been _them_ – he knows it must have been.

He’d been unforgivably weak. Knowing that she saw something in him that others didn’t, thinking that it would be enough to make her stay. He’d seen her eyes in the firelight, he knew she saw him. There was no hiding behind antagonism anymore, for either of them. He had never reached so far for another being. He had never risked so much.

He can just imagine how the Resistance will keep her close; exploit her ability like a secret weapon; groom her. And one day, she will come to kill him, too. There is no other path for her; for them. He’d offered the only alternative he had to give, and she’d silenced that hope with a raise of her hand.

He reaches out, at first cautiously. Then forcefully. Then viciously. The force bond is a nonentity. He reaches out with his thoughts, and they come away from the night sky cold. He searches blindly, but he can’t detect any trace of the bond at all. He wonders if he ever could, or if he’d just been deceiving himself. Blinded by his confidence in their shared circumstances, and by his faith in the sentience of the Force.

The more he fails to connect with the bond, the clearer it becomes that Snoke was not lying when he claimed to be the one that bridged their minds. The fact seems so obvious to him now, he’s ashamed he didn’t recognize it from their first connection. He was such an arrogant fool. He’d been completely overwhelmed by the appearance of the bond. He hadn’t questioned for a moment the strength of it, the pull of it. He hadn’t questioned nearly enough about their connection.

It explains why he never had any control over the bond himself – he, who had always possessed incomparable ability with the Force. Even Rey, with her intuitive bursts of influence, had been unable to manipulate their sporadic connection.

They could not control the bond because they had never been intended to control it. Snoke had always been the one pulling the strings. There was probably no being alive but him who possessed the skill necessary to create such a bridge. And now that he’s gone, so is his handiwork. The last glimpse he and the girl had of one another must have been just that – a final glimpse. A flicker of Snoke’s immense power, echoing in the Force before going silent forever.

Even then, after everything. Even knowing that they’d both been deceived…he’d wanted her to join him. Needed her to join him.

Now it’s too late. Anything they could have had between them is dead. There is no returning to it. Snoke’s death made that a certainty; her rejection substantiated it.

And yet he wants…he wants…

His hatred for the Resistance is a flavor on his tongue. They are an implicit threat to him, and any chance he has of maintaining his rule. He needs them to die. He needs to be the one to destroy them. He couldn’t end Luke, but there is still a chance for him to know peace. There has to be.

Yet he wants…he wants…

The wordless frustration writhes. It sprinkles salt on the tensions that are already cutting his mind to ribbons. His assuredness with the Force – always a constant to him– feels watery at best. Nothing is certain, and everything is empty. Not even an echo of a tremor to guide his way in the dark. Silent and cold.

He runs his fight simulations until long past what should have been midnight – if the sky had been marking the time at all.

The hours pass, and his nights begin to involve a new kind of torture. Lying in his narrow bed, new feelings approach like specters. New sensations that make his nerves jolt to attention like live wires. A soft pressure, like an arm, slinging limply across his waist. A warm puff of breath cresting softly at the nape of his neck. Heat emanating from somewhere just beyond the twisted sheets. He shudders into consciousness, reaching out, hair falling over his reeling eyes. He’s always alone.

One night he swears that he feels the mattress dip, and a warm, soft shape curls against his back. He’s out of the bed in half a second, staring at its emptiness with unblinking eyes, willing the shape to materialize out of the dark. The void doesn’t so much as ripple. It’s silent and cold.

He stalks the hallways until dawn.

 _It can’t be the force bond._ He entreats the weaker impulses that are shaking loose inside of him. Hope appears again, like she was never gone, a determined harpy. The name on her lips is as familiar as his own.

He shuts it out. _It can’t be the force bond._ Another mantra to join the rest.

Snoke is dead. The circuit is disconnected. _They_ are disconnected. If this is anything, then it’s just some remnant of the bond flexing itself, sparking futilely before it fades completely away.

He ignores the conclusion that the logic suggests. That if what he’s feeling isn’t some ghost of the bond taunting him, then he’s getting that much closer to losing his mind. He shuts himself off from the thought, even as its icy fingers close softly around his throat.

Like he’s in open rebellion against logic itself, he continues to reach out with the Force. There is a crazed feeling to the task. Like shoving against a door that no longer exists; there is only the image of it in your mind to guide your efforts. But he can’t let go of the impulse to keep searching. Maybe he just needs the reassurance that he hasn’t missed anything. Or the reassurance of his abilities in general. It’s the reason why lately he’s been sparring with a blindfold and lifting the immense steel doors of his chambers into place with a smooth gesture of his hand.

Like he has been almost since the moment he met her, he is questioning himself.

He finds himself craving the resolve he’d felt in the throne room. For one brief moment, everything had aligned. His entire life doesn’t seem enough to outweigh that small expanse of rightness; of balance.

He bristles against the sting of intuition that says he will have to chase that feeling if he’s ever going to know any peace.


End file.
